No More Naughty Nurses

It’s October and the Naughty Nurse comments are starting.  For instance, this just showed up in my twitter feed:

Our live feed is filling up with Gangnam Style, zombies, and hot nurses. Add your own ghoulish gag via http://t.co/48u7sVr7

— refer.ly (@Referly) October 3, 2012

 ( I love you refer.ly, but gotta call out the uncoolness.)

I have a personal dislike of the whole hot nurse thing because I have personal experience of how it can lead to sexual harassment. One summer when I was in college I worked in a nursing home as a nurse’s aide.  People are sexual beings and for most people in a nursing home, masturbation is their only release.  I’m cool with that.  I was not cool with the men who fetishized us in our nurses uniforms and flashed us or openly masturbated only when we came in the room.  We were told that to do more than tell them to stop would be considered patient abuse.  Leaving the room when they were due to have care of some type was considered more than telling them to stop.  (Leaving the room if you walked in on someone who was attempting to masturbate in private was just respecting their privacy.)  We had a patient who would refuse to use a urinal so that the ‘nurse’ would come wipe him off.

I’m also opposed to the naughty nurse stereotype because of where it came from.  Why the sexy nurse, not the sexy doctor?  Why the sexy secretary, not the sexy boss?  Why the sexy maid? Because women who worked outside the home (versus in the family business that was usually located in the same building where they lived), had a ‘dangerous’ level of freedom and so were ‘tainted’ with the possibility of using that freedom to be sexual in unapproved ways.  They were also target, unprotected by the rest of the family as they would be in the family business.

I have no objection to letting your sexy out for Halloween or any other time you won’t be performing non-consensual exhibitionism.  I may show up in a sexy Halloween costume myself.  But remember, it’s a costume, a fantasy, and not a reality.  And there is no reason to talk about hot nurses, hot secretaries, hot whatever, when we can talk about hot costumes; because it is costume, not nursing or secretarying or whatever that we are really talking about.

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Moving Users on MySQL

Copying users from a database on host1 to a database on host2 under MySQL:
echo "select concat(\"show grants for '\", user,\"'@'\", host, \"';\") from user where host='localhost' or host = '127.0.0.1';" | mysql -u root -p --skip-column-names -h host1 mysql | mysql -u root -p --skip-column-names -h host1 mysql | sed 's/$/;/' | mysql -u root -p -h host2

SVN Administration The Hard Way

For the last couple years, I’ve worked with a couple people who know a whole lot more than I do about svn, and so my troubleshooting method has been to ask someone smarter than me. I no longer work with those people. So, today I learned a couple lessons about subversion administration the hard way.

First, if everything that talks to the repository just hangs, svn is probably “wedged” and the way to fix it is to shutdown everything that uses svn (ie apache if you are using svn over https) and then as the repository user (again apache in the above case) you run the command:

svnadmin recover /var/svn/repos

And then you pray (unless you backup your svn repository database, in which case you still have an out.)

Also the SVN Book’s Repository Maintenance page is your friend. (It teaches you how to make backups too!)

Why people (including me) aren’t ready for today’s “DTV Switch”

This started out as a comment to this article on Techdirt, but it got so long, I decided it deserved to be it’s own blog post.

Here in Oregon about 40% of people still used solely terrestrial TV prior to the push for DTV switch (haven’t seen any numbers on how many people fell for the cable / satellite providers propaganda that they are the way to switch to digital.)  Sat. coverage is much worse than on the East coast and there are still many areas (even in cities) where you either can’t get cable or have to pay to have the cable brought for blocks or miles to your house.  I live in your average built in the 40’s type city/suburban neighborhood.  I know we didn’t HAVE cable in our neighborhood when I moved in ~5 years ago and was pricing cable internet vs DSL.  They’d bring it in, but forget the “free installation by 5 o’clock today!” offers…

If the FTC and local stations had actually cared about people converting, they would have put build your own Hoverman antenna shows on (like, oh, Make TV did), not the endless crawlers and shows about how to buy an antenna.  90% of the people I know who still have only broadcast TV have the supplies in their home to build a simple Hoverman antenna variation and know someone who could have helped them with it if they couldn’t do it themselves.  Most of them don’t have $50 for a commercial antenna plus someone to install it in their attic.

The reality though is that the test environment – and even the supposedly real environment here today in Portland Oregon, a reasonably large TV market, on the first day of “Digital Only” broadcast TV DOES NOT MATCH the actual long term production broadcast environment.  That doesn’t start til tomorrow.  So should you throw money at a problem that might be fixed (or fixable for less) when the real environment comes on line?  Or wait?  When the penalty is that you might have to listen to the radio, read the paper, or use the internet for a few days to get your news and entertainment, clearly waiting for the real environment is a big win!

I got a converter box over a year ago when they first became inexpensively available and we actually had stations broadcasting.  Even with a powered antenna booster, the only digital station I could reliably get was the local 24 hour weather station – if I put the antenna in a location where I got no analog stations.  (Of course, in the middle of the night, I had digital stations, but I’m generally more interested in sleeping than watching TV at 3 am.)  At that point I’d spent as much as I was willing to on TV, so I figured I’d watch the analog stations ’til they disappeared then switch to Hulu.com etc for all my TV viewing. 

Apparently our ABC affiliate is switching to the UHF spectrum on 6/13 and since I find their news reasonably useful/entertaining (and my husband is going into TV withdrawal), I figure I’ll give the converter box/antenna another try when they do that.  If that fails, then I’ll probably salvage parts from my rabbit ears and junk in my garage to build this.  But if I have to spend money every month, give me more general purpose internet bandwidth, not TV!

See also Which Gray-Hoverman TV Antenna Should I Build

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Stop Everything

If you ever get paid to write code or are interested in professionalism in IT, go read this right now.
Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – The Daily WTF

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I heart phpformatter

Nothing beats a code formating tool when you think your bug is due to a misplaced bracket.  Unfortunately, we use a relatively rare formating standard.  Lucky for me, I discovered that http://www.phpformatter.com/ can use Whitesmith style.

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The big hoopla on the switch to digital TV

Apparently, we here in the Pacific NW US are the highest users of broadcast TV at 40%.  I fall in that 40%.  If you aren’t in the US, you don’t care about any of this.  For those of you in the rest of the US, let me explain something, satellite coverage here is a joke compared to the rest of the country.  And you can’t get our local ABC affiliate on one of the major local satellite companies.  Seriously.  Cable isn’t actually an option in many places.  I know there is no cable connection to my house.  I’m not sure we actually have it on my street (this is a fairly educated guess since the utilities are above ground, the easement runs through my back yard, the best access to the poles for 5 houses is in my back yard, and the utility people always like me to get my dogs out of the yard before they go to work.)

As far as digital conversion.  I have a damn converter box.  And an antenna booster.  And a rooftop antenna (albeit an older, not optimized for digital, model.)  The only one that is hooked up right now is the rooftop antenna.  Why?  I get a significantly better analog signal.  Significantly enough to not care about the extra channels that are being broadcast (then again I can point out more compelling podcasts and vodcast available 24/7).   Significantly enough that some of the “regular” channels are hard to watch in digital.  Will it get better when I get a modern rooftop antenna?  Possibly, but since the broadcast towers are 90 degrees apart and you are supposed to aim the antenna at the towers (note 1 antenna to multiple towers), I’m not particularly hopeful.  And I only get up on my roof for trivial reasons (like TV reception), during the dry season, so I guess we’ll find out in June or July some time (I guess I could have done it last year but I was on medication that recommended against such ventures.)  Once I’m forced to switch, I’ll watch the one or two channels that come in some of the time on, relive my childhood on hulu.com, and watch some of the many independent video efforts that places like YouTube have made so accessible.   Until then, could you please let me enjoy my TV in peace?    Really, I think we’ve all figured out that the DTV switchover is coming.   We don’t need switchover practice hours or days (or is it just a coincidence that KOIN has been hinting that they will be doing something to help us practice and today we have no analog signal? )  We don’t need a huge bar on the bottom part of the screen about the switch over ALL THE TIME.  In fact, if the technology really were so much better, we wouldn’t need a government mandated switch over.

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Frey and his Steed, Golden-Bristle by Jacques Reich

File:Frey and his Steed, Golden-Bristle by Jacques Reich.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I found this great image of my oldest (maybe second oldest) known ancestor on Wikipedia. I don’t know what Jacques Reich’s sources were, but I can see quite the family resemblance to a number of his male descendents pictured or mentioned in Slegten Buck’s Stamtavle. Particularly the nose and lanky figure.

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MySQL Armageddon

It’s MySQL Dude, destruction is the default option. – Jason

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Bad News from the Colo

I think it’s bad news when they are up on the roof of your colo working on the HVAC systems in below freezing weather.

I can see this from my desk and I think I’d be much happier if I couldn’t!

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